A lot of companies are outsourcing these days. …it's just a little disheartening to hear that Square Enix will do it with Final Fantasy .
As many know, the development time for Final Fantasy XIII was long and arduous, and it cost more than the publisher would've liked. FFXIII and FFXIII-2 director Motomu Toriyama said at the peak of development time for FFXIII, there were over 200 people working on it and in short, with that large-scale development team, they didn't use their time very well . Said Toriyama:
"How do you communicate to everyone in the department what the drive of the game is? We decided we needed to create more practical milestones, not story-based ones."
They realized they "needed to apply more Western technology and production techniques" as time went on, so when it comes to large-scale projects in the future, Square Enix will tackle them a little differently. Basically, it won't be a 100% internal design process; outsourcing will allow them to hit their targets faster.
"We are also thinking that we will not do large-scale internal development any longer. We have a lot of great creators in Square Enix, but for larger-scale development we will be doing more distributed and outsourced development to reach our targets on time."
They'd go for a monthly milestone form of development, where they've got goals set for each month and they "decide the core of what we need to do, and plan for that." And even though development for FFXIII-2 was smoother and faster, Toriyama believes they could still improve. As it turns out, they didn't have time to implement all the fixes and changes the fans asked for after FFXIII.
I have no reaction. Outsource? Yeah, sure, go ahead. Whatever.
